Becoming emeritus usually means an opportunity to slow things down a bit, but that has certainly not been the case for UCMP curators Jim Valentine, Bill Clemens, or Carole Hickman by any means. But starting a new job? Well, welcome to "retirement" as defined by Jere Lipps! Jere has just accepted the position of Director of Orange County's John D. Cooper Center for Archaeological and Paleontological Curation and Research.

The Cooper Center is a partnership between Orange County Parks and California State University Fullerton and is "dedicated to preserving the natural and cultural history of Orange County." Its sizable paleo collection represents plants and animals from every major time period since the Jurassic, but only a small fraction of the collection has been inventoried. In Jere's words: "The whales, walruses, and other marine animals and Eocene vertebrate fossils in the collection are tremendous additions to the knowledge and heritage of Orange County and the Pacific Rim and will help fill in critical gaps in current knowledge. Some of the fossils are as old as the oldest rocks (Jurassic) that make up Orange County."

Though this will be a return to Southern California for Jere, having been born in Los Angeles and receiving his Ph.D. at UCLA, we trust that the Berkeley connections will continue.